Sarah Slade

This week we’ve been looking at open/informal experimentation, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and opening up scholarship beyond the academy.

We were asked what we were changing and experimenting within our practice – trying to remember a time when a small change had a big impact. I had a think about this and remembered something about the digital learning programmes at New Place.

The issue with the digital learning programmes is that they were often collections of resources from across the internet,  thrown into a digital learning plan and presented to the learner. Learners complained that the resources were often irrelevant and difficult to navigate.  It’s not like the content was particularly wrong or bad, but learners didn’t know when to start. For example, last month I reworked a programme on Agile. The content itself was great: a collection of videos from external experts talking about how they had implemented agile in their work context, and why it worked for them; lots of practical tips and tricks. A consultant who ran workshops on agile methods created a bunch of explainer videos, walking people through the ceremonies. All good stuff, but utterly bewildering for anybody new to agile.

All it needed was a bit of scaffolding and organisation, which is where the learning exp designer comes in (*waves*).

I organised the resources into clearly-labelled categories, added some explanatory articles that outlined what learners would find in each category and how it could help them, I also added links to the slide decks for anybody who needed a comprehensive offline manual (they were very detailed).

 If the LMS and time had allowed it, I would have added playlists so that learners could come back and revise sections quickly without having to watch the whole thing again. Actually, given a bit more time I would have split each explainer into sections so that learners could just find the bits they needed.

It took me about half a day to reorganise everything, add some nice graphics and write the scaffold text, Before this course I probably would have come up with a new set of categories, but the explanatory articles or nudges wouldn’t have occurred to me. 

Was it open scholarship? Not strictly – because we’re on a closed system that discourages open sharing for security reasons. But there were openly available resources in the mix and what I did was incorporate some open practice into the way the course was constructed.

I’m still unclear as to how I can incorporate open scholarship into my day to day work – we’re a closed corporate with big security issues. When it comes to nicking stuff off the interwebs, I’m already a mistress of that art. Though come to think of it, a lot of what Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams was talking about in making her research process and results transparent works quite well with agile methodology. We could make the process for making and sharing learning more transparent and collaborative, so that learners aren’t just passive receivers of learning, but active participants.